With the omnipresence of computers and the Internet, increasing amounts of information are created, distributed and/or accessed in digital form. Examples of such digital forms of information, including text and graphics information, include Adobe's Acrobat (pdf) format, HTML and/or SGML formats, various word processor formats (such as Microsoft Word's ‘doc’ format or Corel WordPerfect's ‘wpd’ format), video formats including Apple's QuickTime MOV format and Microsoft's AVI format, MPEG compressed video and many others. Information can be created in, or converted to or between, these formats and distributed and/or stored in them as desired.
While this revolution in distribution and representation of information has many advantages, it does suffer from some disadvantages. For example, especially in view of the development of the Internet, the amount of information available on a macroscopic level can be overwhelming, making it difficult or impossible to recognize relevant information even after it has been located. Specifically, it is not uncommon that a search of the Internet on any common topic will return several hundreds of possible documents of interest which must be reviewed by a user to determine the relevance of the documents to the topic.
On a microscopic level, when a document is under consideration, it can be difficult to find the portions of that document which are of interest or significance. This is especially true for long documents which cannot be displayed on one or two screen displays of a computer monitor, such as legal decisions, technical documents, patents, stories, etc.
It is therefore desired to have a system, apparatus and method which makes easier the identification and interaction with information represented and/or stored in digital form.